I first encountered the members of Bent Duo – David Friend and Bill Solomon – playing in Ensemble Signal, a group best known for its performances of the pulsing, contrapuntal music of Steve Reich, such as Music for 18 Musicians, in which Signal’s interpretations strike an admirable balance of clockwork clarity and human warmth. But a quick visit to the piano/percussion pair’s YouTube channel reveals that they are equally adept at making musical sense out of repertoire inspired more by the likes of John Cage and the Fluxus collective, to whom any event, no matter how outlandish or everyday, could be transformed – simply by framing it as a work of art – into a piece of music.

Their new project, Ramble – which starts at 7pm on August 16 at Le Petit Versailles, a small, queer-run community garden on the Lower East Side – is an original, durational, immersive, interactive performance installation inspired by “cruising,” the age-old gay mating ritual. Essential in the age of the closet, now rendered nearly obsolete by the AIDS epidemic and the advent of apps like Grindr, cruising used (and still uses) backward glances and coded gestures to turn public places like restrooms and parks – such as the once-infamous Ramble section of Central Park – into sites of sexual serendipity. Throughout the course of the performance, a small number of guests will be admitted into Ramble at any given time, there to wander through a series of intimate and perhaps surprising musical encounters.

I sat down with Solomon recently in the garden of a Chelsea cafe for a long and appropriately rambling conversation, in which he made references to works from a century of queer theory, queer literature, and queer experimental music—most of which I cut from this heavily compressed transcript for the sake of clarity and brevity.

NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: So tell me about this piece!

BILL SOLOMON: David and I, we’ve known each other forever, but we’ve been Bent Duo for three years or so… We met playing in Signal, and performing minimalism, especially a lot of the Steve Reich things that we did over the years, has informed how we work together. Playing Music for 18 Musicians is really exhausting—you have to learn how to approach your body in a way that you can get these works clear in your mind.

Next week we’re performing Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston up in Woodstock, and that’s four-and-a-half to five hours with no break. [Editor’s note: Read a review of that August 10 performance, here.] And the Ramble piece… I think that will be like 90 minutes. We’re interested in pushing ourselves. It’s fun to see where your limits are.

With Bent Duo, we were pretty intentional in how we formed our group. We wanted to do something that was queer and something that we had control over, and eventually we wanted to produce our own work, also. That took a bit of time to work up to. We played rep – we still do that! – but we were looking for a place to produce our music. We’re not known as composers, and that can be a problem for venues.

Le Petits Versailles
Photograph courtesy Le Petits Versailles/Allied Productions, Inc.

I saw this call for performances at Le Petit Versailles, and we proposed a different project there that was going to include new work, which we hadn’t thought much about. They were really into the group and into the general project, and we wanted to do something that was site-specific and involved the garden in some way. They’ve got a long history as a queer-run space, so it seemed like the right place for it.

When some of the other things we were going to do didn’t come to fruition, we were just like, wellp, instead of doing other works – we were going to do a Cage piece, and then a piece by one of our friends in L.A., and some other stuff – let’s just do our own! This is the perfect place to do our own piece. And thinking about the garden, we were thinking about outdoors and we were thinking about summer, and it naturally led to cruising.

Naturally.

We talked about, in making our own work, doing stuff that involves the audience in some way, doing things that aren’t typical. You know, we’re a piano/percussion duo in spirit, but we hate trying to find places with pianos, and I’m tired of schlepping percussion gear all over the place, so a lot of things came together. This garden definitely does not have a piano, and… have you been there before?

Many times! I know the people who run it.

It’s a cool, tiny place. I used to play in this German cabaret group a long time ago, and we did a show there, which was fun, and we brought a keyboard in – I was playing piano for them at the time – and it seemed like a nice place to try to do something that could allow the audience to roam about, and create something where they can discover things. That’s where the idea of Ramble and this “cruising piece” came about.

What is cruising? How would you describe it?

Hmm… that’s a good question, actually. I can’t say I’m a “cruiser,” because it’s not something I’ve necessarily had a lot of experience with.

It’s sort of a seeking-out, checking your area, looking for who else may or may not be available for sex. So there’s a hunt that is on, and a looking for knowing glances. I think you’re paying attention to small but specific cues. And other people, either in their body language – if your eyes linger, if you’re in certain spaces, if you have a handkerchief in a certain place – there’s some sort of cue that this person is available for cruising. That’s half the thing, that whether you’re in a park, or if you’re at a bar or walking around the sidewalk, you’re on the hunt for other people, seeing and sending out those cues as well—a sort of reciprocation.

It’s not just about the sex itself; it’s the moment leading up to it. You could cruise and bring someone back to your place. It doesn’t have to be in a park. We’re choosing to set ours in a park, and thinking about the Ramble, which of course was a famous cruising spot, but it could really be anywhere. It’s really about seeking out available partners.

But it’s important that it has a public aspect to it, that it takes place in public spaces.

How would you describe the materials of the piece? Without spoiling anything…

Specifically thinking about the space—as you know, it’s not huge, so we want to limit the number of people who can be in the space at the same time. If it’s crowded, you’re not going to get a sense of exploration, so we only want to allow a few people in at a time, in which people can come to the space and explore.

We’re going to put some sound installations in the space that may or may not be going all the time – maybe come in quietly; maybe there’s activity – and then maybe an audience member will stumble across a performer, and depending on certain factors, there may be a small performance that happens just for you. So there’s this private sort of thing, but you can watch someone else have a performance in a corner, so there’s possibly an aspect of voyeurism also.

What happens in the performances—maybe I’ll leave that to the audience’s experience. David and I, as performers, will be doing different things at different times, based on different circumstances, so we’re really taking cruising as sort of a form, in which to insert all these private performances, with small things that can happen in it.

And maybe you come into the space, and nothing happens for you, and that was the thing about cruising that’s kind of fun: there’s no guarantees. You stumble across something, and maybe it’s really exciting, maybe it’s boring, so, you know, maybe you don’t like it and so you walk away. This will be our first go at it, to get a sense of how the audience chooses to engage with the environment and how we appear to them as performers.

Bill Solomon
Photograph courtesy Bent Duo

Musicologists like Philip Brett and Phil Gentry have tried to find a connection specifically between the indeterminacy in the music of John Cage and his experiences cruising the parks as a young man—though of course Cage would probably say that there was no connection between anything in his music and anything in his sex life.

For David and I, it’s actually going to be pretty controlled, because we know what’s going to happen. But it’s the way that the audience member interacts with the work and the space that’s going to be the indeterminate thing. We’re going to have a score, more or less, of what we do when we come up and interact with people. But it’s unlikely that someone will get to experience everything that happens, because it’s a durational work.

One piece that was a very profound influence was Sleep No More—there’s no way you can take all of that in, so whatever happens, it’s your own experience of that work. So the potentiality is quite broad, but obviously it’s a specific thing that’s going to happen.

Cage is an interesting example, in the case of his brand of indeterminacy—because there are other indeterminate composers who are not queer. All indeterminacy itself isn’t queer. It’s how queers can use indeterminacy, and how that speaks to these types of erotic experiences in the pre-iPhone era.

I guess even there, if you’re on an app, there’s some sort of indeterminacy of who you come across, right? I don’t know.

I think it’s certainly much less so, because you’ve got a menu of what’s available: “Oh, here’s this person, who looks a certain way, and is interested in a certain thing, and I can pursue that.” As opposed to, like, walking through spaces, and what is available makes itself known to you.

If you think about a traditional, proscenium-style performance, where you’ve got the audience facing us and we’re performing for you, that’s very normative, and so to find a way to topple that over, to queer the erotics of that presentation… it’s interesting to think about how we can structure a performance around that. It’s cool to talk about works that involve the audience and whatnot, but I think it’s a tricky thing to find what works. I don’t always want to interact when I’m an audience member! Sometimes I just want to see a show, I don’t want to be engaged. And I’m sure we’ve all been in performances where we’re just made extremely uncomfortable.

In our piece, hopefully, [audience members] can choose on which level they want to engage with us. If they want to get really close to us, they can. But if you just want to maybe dip in for a minute or two, check it out and you’re done, then you still got to experience the piece, but you’re not held captive in any way. I’ve been to I don’t know how many bad queer performance art events, and I think I have a face that says “pick me” even though I don’t want to be picked. There’s enough of these sorts of things, so we’re trying to find a way to get consent into the equation as well.

If you’re cruising, of course people do things they’re not supposed to do, but usually, if you’re not interested, you can just walk away. You’re not beholden. You’re not trapped in a room with somebody.

What does it mean to “queer” something?

We can think of “queer” as a noun, or as a verb, or as an adjective. “Queering” something – that’s a verb, of course – we’re taking something that is not queer to begin with, that is normative in some way, and perhaps keeping it intact but looking at it sideways, looking at it through a queer perspective. Perhaps you’re taking something that exists, something that is not queer, and you’re modifying it in some way, so that it conforms to queer bodies and queer desires. It’s kind of a remix, or recreation, or a rethinking. Just approaching something from a different angle, through queer experiences and queer bodies. We’re coming at it from a different place.

It’s one of those words that people use so much that it’s lost so much meaning. “Queer” anything! I do think it is important, as we do this work, that we always start with queer bodies and queer desires, because if that’s not in the equation somewhere, then it’s not meaningful. Now, “What is queer?”—that is a separate conversation, but if anything can “queer” anything whenever, then it is completely meaningless. It’s not useful anymore.

When we’re thinking about queerness in music, it’s always turning backwards, existing now and looking back to the ’70s, which were supposed to be a utopian, queer sexual space. But there’s also a lot of danger, and of course issues with race, and then came HIV and AIDS. And I want to make sure that we’re not painting a false picture of this past that was dangerous for a lot of people. You know, you can get beat up!

Who was the photographer that did all the pictures of the piers – Alvin Baltrop? – where sometimes it’s really great, people are hanging out… and sometimes your throat gets slit. There was definitely that sense of danger, and these sorts of unknown experiences. And I think it’s good to make sure that we keep that in mind, that we’re not just fantasizing about what the ’70s were like.

David Friend
Photograph courtesy Bent Duo

I’m not sure that this is a question, but this is something that just occurred to me today while I was thinking about your music and percussion performance in general: I’m always amazed by musicians who can make sense of a really opaque score, and sort of be able to, amidst all of this indeterminacy, find a kind of through-line or lyricism. And then I thought—well, that’s kind of what percussionists do! You have these dots on a page, and each one represents an attack that then immediately decays, and so your job is to look at this series of dots, and create this series of attacks, oftentimes from many different instruments at the same time, and find a through-line, a lyricism or narrative…

Some sort of continuity. A performance can’t be discontinuous—unless there’s some continuity to that.

It’s slight of hand, right? Think about how many years pianists practice Chopin to make it sound beautiful and lyrical. That’s not what the instrument naturally does! It’s like, clunk clunk clunk clunk clunk, but you work hard to build your technique so that you can play legato. Percussion adds complications, because you’re dealing with a range of instruments that all have different types of attacks and sustains, and are made of different materials, and if you hit one instrument with the same velocity as the other, that might produce two widely different dynamics. So you have to account for all that, even if you just want something to sound flat, which is a challenge!

So you’re asking, how do we make sense out of this density, if that’s your goal? Even if you’re taking an experimental approach to a score, you have to find something that carries a listener through what you’re doing, right? Or else it just sounds like noise. Though noise can be nice…

And maybe that’s also related to cruising, taking this sort of randomness and finding these things that one can grasp onto. It’s that knowing glance on the sidewalk: “Oh, okay.” So maybe there’s an added bonus there of being a queer performer, producing some sort of logic out of a discontinuous set of occurrences. That sounds like a pretty good thesis. (I love academia! It’s all B.S.)

If you read a lot of books at the same time, you’ll always come across some sort of overlap between what you’re reading, even if they’re not related at all. When you push things together in interesting ways, then unexpected outcomes happen. Maybe that’s part of the fun doing stuff not in a hall, where the most exciting thing that could happen, besides the piece being good, is that someone’s phone rings – that’s unexpected – or you get angry at someone talking. But if you’re outdoors, then something’s going to happen, some overlap of the text, or of where people are placed.

That’s the part of the fun of cruising as well, right? People could walk by, it could start raining, you find a quarter on the ground… I think those all have to be connected, in some way.

Bent Duo presents Ramble at Le Petit Versailles on August 16 at 7pm; details here. The duo also performs music by Sarah Hennies in a Time:Spans Festival concert shared with Deerhoof at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music on August 18 at 8pm; timespans.org

Daniel Stephen Johnson is a sheet music salesman living in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Any views expressed are not those of his employer, or indeed anybody’s employer.

Classical music coverage on National Sawdust Log is supported in part by a grant from the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. The Log makes all editorial decisions.